About the interview: There is an emptiness that invites us all to escape. I did, for a while, living for 10 years without electricity in a self-built cabin in Northern Ontario, Canada.

William Powers did. And who is he? Google tells me about an American from Long Island, an international development and aid worker in poorer countries, a man concerned with the extinction of people, languages, and Nature.

Stan writes in A Garlic Testament about “the pound weight of the real,” the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary’s farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that’s exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt canals called acequias. This wasn’t just pragmatism; I sensed a real passion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.